Description:
WARNING: This video uses some of the more gruesome costumes available in The Movies. Viewer discretion is advised.
Although completed and delivered in time for Halloween, I've been meaning to upload this music video for weeks now, and have only now got around to it.
This is a kind of spiritual successor to my last major project, Hunter, which has already been uploaded here. The only other person working on Hunter besides me was Paul Wisby, who provided the music score. As I was unable to pay him monetarily for his efforts (although he would later put various cues from the soundtrack on online stock music stores), I felt I should find some way to repay him. Fortunately, this opportunity presented itself recently when he asked for a music video for a song by a band of his, Binary Disorder.
This song, Frankenstein, was an unusual one for the purpose of a music video. Rather than being a short 3-minute piece with vocals and clearly defined verses and choruses, it was more of a club anthem, where the same samples and instrumentations are developed over a long period. This made outlining the music video very different to how I would have otherwise approached it. Usually I would have sat down and storyboarded the whole thing in my head, noting down particular lulls and climaxes and ensuring what was happening on screen reflected that. Instead, my work process was pretty much the same as all my other The Movies films, only with the occasional thought towards how it would sync with the music.
The biggest departure from my usual Movies fare, though, was the use of multiple takes. Up until Hunter, I had always relied upon the stock camera movements, but with Hunter I began playing with custom camera positions. However, this was always very limited, scenes would be done in one or two takes. With this, the opening scenes were a far cry from Hunter, with around five or six takes of the 30-second battle scene and many, many more for the following scene.
A brief and interesting addendum is that one of the alien bodies you see strewn around in that first scene was originally to be played by the Stuntman Sterling Lanier, who doubled for the original actor in the reshoots for Hunter. Sadly though, he hit 75 years of age very soon before the completion of filming, resulting in him walking off the studio lot and the production temporarily shutting down. The game then started telling me that there were insufficient extras to complete the film, despite the fact that he only appeared in the background of the opening scene, so therefore we'd already shot all his stuff. But no, we had to replace him and redo all the multiple takes of the opening battle scene AGAIN. I like to think, to cover an annoying programming quirk, that when he walked off the lot he made it be known that he would sue if we used any footage with him in it. Even in a simplified, idealistic representation of the movie industry, people are still assholes.
With all that boring technical stuff out of the way, now on to the actual content. Since there was little in the actual music that would give inspiration for visuals, I took what is arguably the hack's way out and just took the title and ran with it.
The biggest thing in my mind was the feedback I'd gained from Hunter's release: that the visual-only no-dialogue approach had resulted in confused viewers. I decided to give this approach one last chance, as I wanted to at least try to make it work. So, while the approach remains the same, I realised the problem with Hunter wasn't the approach at all, it was the fact that the approach was being used to tell a story too complex for it.
Therefore, I went for far more familiar (and, some would say, derivative) territory: that of being heavily inspired by Mary Shelley's classic novel. It's a widely known story, it's simple enough to tell with visuals alone, and it's the damn title of the song for crying out loud.
I'm proud of what I managed to do here. I think it fits well with the music, especially syncing the gun blast with the opening note of the song, and for my first time using the post-production effects in my editing software, the additions I made in post look pretty good. So, please enjoy what I hope will be an improvement over Hunter, my official music video to Binary Disorder's Frankenstein.

«You weren't kidding on the costumes, but they look cool, though. I like the progression of it story-wise, though some degree of pacing with the music would've been cool, but only on my own personal preference. Overall, I liked this. »